What are the issues in Web 2.0 that is related to Intellectual Property?
Documents are no longer static and unchanging. As the creation and distribution of information become more collaborative, dynamic, and social, and as application software evolves to support “mashups” that combine both content and functionality from various sources, traditional definitions of “documents,” their authorship, and their ownership are becoming obsolete.
Not only is it possible to massively duplicate documents without permission, it is also increasingly possible to modify these documents so that the original intention of the author can become lost. In addition, collaborative document authoring, unless carefully controlled, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify and track the authorship contributions of individual authors.
This author is skeptical of the ability of individual registration systems, built around concepts of static documents carried over from pre-Internet days, to solve the problem of ownership and identification when documents are constantly changing or are authored collaboratively by groups of temporarily involved authors.
What may be more appropriate, this author feels, is that for certain classes of digital documents, the documents themselves should incorporate information traditionally associated with registration systems, as well as information that records the changes and modifications made over time by the author (or authors). This meta-information, always physically associated with the source document, should always be available for processing in connection with any business transaction that might require authorship and ownership information.
Web 2.0 Document Authoring
In the world of “Web 2.0” it keeps getting easier to collaboratively collect and distribute information content and associated metadata. Readily available aggregations of XML feeds, along with richly-functional remotely hosted content management applications, are enabling people to combine information sources of all kinds in new, unique, and potentially very powerful ways. “Mash-ups” of applications and data drawn from multiple sources are beginning to appear online, facilitated by the evolution of modern application architectures and data standards that facilitate interchangeability.
This is a far cry from the static publishing models of the past. The old focus was on creation of a fixed published object like a page, a book, or a magazine article with a specified set of one or more authors. With Web 2.0 we are now seeing how information -- and operations on information -- are becoming increasingly fluid, flexible, network oriented, and social.
One example is the constantly evolving online encyclopedia Wikipedia with its array of online contributors. Similar wiki technology is being applied to a more specialized application like the Peer to Patent Project which may also take advantage of social networking techniques to improve the patent review process.
Despite this move towards acceptance of a fluid publishing model -- where it’s not always clear where information is stored and who has a hand in information creation or modification -- I believe that it is still important that we not destroy the integrity of the intellectual property we now find so easy to copy and manipulate.
References
Web 2.0 and Maintaining the Integrity of Online Intellectual Property[1]